Oya Christie-Miller
founder and director
Since 2008, Oya has helped high school and university students from around the globe get into universities and graduate programs where they can thrive and be challenged. Oya loves to work closely with students to help them discover and build upon their strengths in preparation for the admissions process. She also greatly enjoys developing a sound application strategy, and guiding students and parents through every step of the process. Oya’s students have consistently received acceptances from their top choices, including Ivy League universities, Oxford and Cambridge, and the most competitive undergraduate and graduate programs in their fields.
Oya has a BA from Yale University, an MA from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey, and is currently a PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley. She brings to the admissions process her insights as a previous Yale alumna interviewer and a graduate student instructor at UC Berkeley. As an instructor, she received pedagogical training and taught four semesters of the required Reading and Composition course to undergraduates. In 2016, she won an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor award for her successful track record and stellar reviews. Having taught writing at the university level, Oya has developed her own methodology for tackling the college application essay process.
Prior to entering the field of education, Oya worked as an IT specialist on Wall Street, at Citigroup and Fidessa. Since 2008, in addition to being the Director of Christie Miller Consulting, Oya has worked as an independent educational counselor, including at Virginia Bush and Associates (Singapore), Ivy Education (UK), and William Clarence Education (UK).
Alexander Christie-Miller
Admissions consultant
Alexander has been helping run Christie Miller Consulting since 2017. Alexander holds a first class honours degree in Literature and Theatre Studies from Trinity College Dublin, and a UK National Qualification in Journalism as a senior reporter. For the past fifteen years he has worked as a print journalist, principally in Turkey, where he served as correspondent for the Times of London. His long form reporting has also been published in Newsweek, the Atlantic, Der Spiegel and The White Review among others, and he produced and reported an award-winning documentary on the Syrian civil war for Vice. He is currently writing his first full-length book, about Istanbul's Byzantine city walls, which is due to be published in the UK by William Collins.
Alexander especially enjoys helping students discover their passions, and narrow down their career options. He also cherishes interviewing them at the beginning of their essay writing process and guiding them through finding their own stories.
Leyla Levi
Admissions consultant
Born and raised in Istanbul, Leyla went abroad upon graduating from Robert College. She holds a BA in Architecture from Yale University and an MFA in Directing from the Yale School of Drama. She lives in the US, and in addition to being a university admissions consultant at Christie Miller Consulting, works as a theatre director and teaching artist. Her most recent directing credits include Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare and Marys Seacole by Jackie Sibblies Drury at the Yale School of Drama.
For many years, Leyla served as the artistic director of Gakko, an international summer programme for high school students. She directed programmes in Japan, France, Romania, Indonesia and the US, training teams of multidisciplinary counsellors and mentoring hundreds of students from around the world. As an educator, she takes great pleasure in helping young people dream big, pursue their interests and gain confidence in themselves.
Heval Okçuoğlu
Admissions consultant
Heval is an admissions consultant based in London. She joins our team with more than twenty years of experience in the independent magazine industry. She has translated a book soon to be released from HarperCollins UK, while providing bespoke services for various publishers and distributors. Previously, she worked as a Magazines Manager for Stack Magazines. She was the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of 212, an international, biannual magazine based in Istanbul, and distributed worldwide. She has been a jury member, and a keynote speaker at international design and fashion conferences, and has worked on countless editorial and translation projects for leading arts and culture platforms, newspapers, magazines, art fairs and museums. She created and hosted the radio show The Patchwork on Dinamo FM, Istanbul’s most popular urban music station. As part of her work in the creative industries, she has been passionate about mentoring and guiding young minds.
Zeynep Erekli
Admissions consultant
Zeynep is an admissions consultant based in Istanbul, Turkey. Zeynep has worked previously as a writer, editor, and translator. Her experience includes content creating, consultancy, project development and execution, research and planning, leadership, and management.
She has held a variety of positions at Time Out Istanbul, where she finally served as Editor-in-Chief. In that role, she designed and ran a six-week program, Time Out Istanbul Writer’s Seminar: Cultural Journalism. She has also worked as an editor-at-large for the Time Inc. Group’s New York-based travel monthly Travel + Leisure’s Turkey edition. In addition to travel magazines such as Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveller and Afar, her freelance writing has regularly appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including Hurriyet, Gazete Oksijen, The Art Newspaper, Art Unlimited, Vogue Turkey, GQ Turkey. Zeynep enjoys mentoring students and helping them make sound educational decisions based on thorough research.
Olivia Heal
Essay consultant
Olivia has experience as an essay consultant with students in the UK, in addition to international students from a variety of backgrounds. Within the application essay process, she is particularly focused on supporting high school students’ development as writers, by helping them to develop their intellectual autonomy as well as discovering and honing their own voices.
Olivia is also a PhD Researcher at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the department of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, where she is working on the topic of motherhood in contemporary literature. She received an MRes in Critical Theory and French Literature from the Université Paris VIII and an honours degree in French and Spanish from Trinity College Dublin. At UEA she has worked as seminar leader and lecturer on a number of undergraduate modules including 'Reading and Writing Criticism’ and ‘Contemporary Fiction’. She is currently convening the final year module ‘After Nature: Literature of the Environmental Crisis’. Her short fiction has appeared widely in literary journals including The White Review and The Stinging Fly and her translation of an extract of Marius Daniel Popescu’s La Symphonie du loup was published in Best European Fiction 2016 (Dalkey Archive).
Katie Piner
Essay consultant
Katie has been a writing and essay tutor for the past eleven years. Her experience spans undergraduate college essay applications to PhD dissertations in history and criminology. She focuses on helping her students learn how to organize and effectively communicate their thoughts. For all writing, she believes in the primacy of developing an authentic authorial voice. From the beginning stages of brainstorming through polishing pieces, Katie is devoted to helping her students develop their own best practices for writing. Whether you need help with a specific academic paper, want guidance on college application essays, or just want to become a better writer, she is here for you.
Katie received her BA in Economics and English at Wellesley College. During her "study abroad", she read English at Oxford. This solidified her love of the UK and eventually led her to pursue two MPhils at the University of Cambridge. Currently, Katie is a research associate studying economic history and is working on a series of middle grade fiction books.
Annabel Howard
Essay consultant
Annabel brings fifteen years’ experience of both teaching and writing to your application. She has taught in many different contexts—high school, museums, universities, and board rooms—in Europe, the UK, and Canada. Experience has proved to her time and time again that with focus, engagement, and some careful guidance, every student can not only write, but learn also to enjoy writing.
Annabel has a first class undergraduate degree from Oxford University, as well as masters degrees from the University of East Anglia and the University of Victoria, British Columbia. She has published three books, as well as numerous essays.
Dave Wilson
Essay consultant
Since 2012, Dave has taught creative writing at universities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, to students from a wide range of backgrounds and skill sets. He focusses on the twin pillars of revision and re-envisioning, guiding students in the difficult process of turning abstract ideas into concrete details. His students have regularly received funded places at graduate schools in Canada, America, and abroad.
He holds a PhD from the University of East Anglia, and is the award-winning author of Once You Break a Knuckle, a collection of short stories, and Ballistics, a novel. His fiction and essays have appeared in lit mags across the globe, and in 2011 he won the BBC National Short Story Prize for "The Dead Roads." Since then he has been shortlisted for numerous fiction prizes, and has won the CBC Canada Writes short story prize and the Manchester Fiction Prize. He is in the process of completing two more works of fiction, once he has revised and re-envisioned them.